Walk from Theale via North Street and Englefield, 4.2 miles

24 September

Shortish walk out of ‘Rambling for Pleasure around Reading’.

Parked at the car park at the eastern end of Theale High Street. At this end of the village, the old route of the A4 can be clearly seen leading towards the M4 before ending in a dead end as it reaches the embankment carrying the motorway. There’s a pedestrian footbridge, presumably built at the time the road was cut off when the village was bypassed in the early 1970s, that leads over the M4 to Pincents Lane.

Old route of the A4, looking west towards Theale

Theale has the look of somewhere that was once quite a bit more significant than it is now – which it presumably was given that it must have once been on the main route from Bristol to London. The high street has quite a number of inns and some sizeable buildings, and the village has an unfeasibly enormous village church. Theale’s website claims that ‘Theale was a service station long before the advent of the motorways.’

From the car park we turned left onto a footpath and headed north, crossing a golf course, to the hamlet of North Street. Walked through the village and bore left towards the A340, crossing the road and heading straight on into Englefield. Passed the tea rooms, which we had been hoping would be open on a Sunday, but they’re evidently not. The gardens of Englefield House do open to the public, as Ruth and I visited a few years ago, but not at weekends (which I had forgotten). In fact the link states that they’re only open on a Monday, so it sounds as though they’ve reduced the opening hours further. Ruth went for a browse around the garden centre while I mooched about the driveway taking a photo of the 'Gardens Closed' sign.

The main driveway has evidently been designated as a Permitted Path (or so the walk book told us), so we walked down it and out through the main gates. Crossed over and walked down Englefield Road back into Theale.

Map of the route below: